Are You Happy Now?

Should musicians stay out of politics? No, of course not, it's a ridiculous suggestion. It never ceases to amaze me when people like Tom Morello, a man who has made an extremely successful career writing very specifically political music, has some knuckle-dragger on social media saying to him "you've just lost a fan, musicians should stay out of politics".

Absolutely everything is political, the decision to "not be political" is a political decision, usually based on the fact that the person making it is so protected by the existing politics that they're safe enough to not pay attention to it.

With all that said, I occasionally write about political things, this is one of those. 8 years on from the absolute clusterfuck that was the UK's EU referendum, a referendum that should never have happened, a campaign riddled with illegalities and a government response matched only in its insanity by its incompetence, the UK is a poorer, smaller, nastier place as a result. I'm still pissed off about it.

The lasting question for me is "are you happy now?" Now that a certain, very specific part of the population have got exactly what they wanted, and seen the consequences, are they happy? It's a pertinent question because those same people appear to still be furious about everything and still desperate to blame all their ills on some poorly-defined "other". This song also targets the age demographic of the average "leave" voter. It seemed so very spiteful to me that a demographic who had benefited most from EU membership wanted to take those benefits away from younger people all the time knowing that any consequence of their actions would not be experienced by them.

I think it's important we keep talking about this stuff. There's a temptation to just "move on" because Brexit is a thing of the past now, but it's not. It's important we keep acknowledging the corruption, the dishonesty, the racism and where it's lead us. We can't improve things without recognising how we got where we are.

You can listen to Are You Happy Now? and read the lyrics below.